The Birth of PCI-Express (PCGH-Retro, April 17)

…2002: ISA followed the XT bus, and chaos followed ISA: Different manufacturers tried to enforce different bus standards for PC expansion cards; EISA, Microchannel, VESA Local Bus, and finally PCI competed for motherboard dominance in the late 80’s and early 90’s. For a long time it was not foreseeable which technology would prevail until Intel’s PCI finally became the standard. When it came time to develop a successor, this confusion was not to be repeated: a working group with industry giants such as IBM, Intel and Microsoft jointly developed the successor standard, codenamed 3GIO, which means ‘3approx Ggeneration Iinput/Ooutput’ stands; The development will be completed on April 17, 2002. The name of the new technology: PCI Express. Instead of a parallel bus system, PCI Express uses serial point-to-point connections so that the components no longer have to share their transfer rates. PCI-E is also easily scalable: while a simple network card gets by with a 250 MByte/s connection, sixteen (theoretically also 32) of these lines can be bundled for graphics cards. The new standard only needs a few years to replace the AGP graphics interface – but the goal of also replacing PCI is still a long way off years later and it was not until early 2011 that the first mainboards appeared that also dispensed with PCI slots.